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Right-wing governments 'increase suicide rates'

18 September 2002

By Andy Coghlan

Right-wing governments may sap some people’s will to live and result in more suicides, conclude studies in Britain and Australia.

The researchers speculate that losers are more likely to kill themselves in the individualistic, “winner-takes-all” societies favoured by right wing governments, because they are left to fend for themselves. Wide disparities in wealth also sharpen any sense of hopelessness, the researchers argue.

“If you fail under that ideology, it would accentuate your feelings of failure,” says Mary Shaw, whose team at the University of Bristol analysed suicide trends in England and Wales over the past century.

Left wing governments tend to be more “inclusive” and community based, she says, decreasing the isolation felt by people down on their luck. Shaw’s team calculates that over the past century, 35,000 extra suicides occurred when the Tories were in power.

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“That’s equivalent to one suicide for every day of the 20th Century, or two for every day that the Conservatives ruled,” the team write in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Britain’s Conservative Party declined to comment on the findings.

Double trouble

Shaw and her colleagues found that on average, suicide rates were 17 per cent higher when the Conservatives were in power, compared to the annual average of 103 suicides per million population when opposition parties held office.

Richard Taylor and his team in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney found similar trends over the past century in New South Wales. When Right-wing governments were in power, men were 17 per cent more likely and women 40 per cent more likely to commit suicide.

They report that rates were highest whenever Right wing governments held power both at federal and state levels.

Both studies reached their conclusions after taking into account other factors that affect suicide rates, such as economic slumps, wartime, and even a surge of suicides among women in the 1960s when sedatives became widely available.

“You’ve never had it so good”

But the same trend always emerged, even at times of economic boom such as the “you’ve-never-had-it-so-good” years when Harold MacMillan led the UK’s Tory government between 1957 and 1963.

During that time, annual suicides peaked at 137 per million population. Shaw points out that rates were almost as high in the 1930s (135 per million) when Labour’s Ramsay McDonald headed a coalition, but she believes the primary reason then was the century’s worst economic slump.

The lowest rate was 85 per million, during the Liberal government of David Lloyd George between 1916 and 1920. Now, under Tony Blair, it is back to the non-Conservative average of 103, down from 121 during Margaret Thatcher’s first term in the early 1980s.

Shaw admits that attempts to connect the differences to ideologies are pure speculation. “But I’d be very interested to see if suicide rates are higher wherever there’s a Right-wing government,” she says. “I’d be particularly interested to see if the relationship holds in the US.”

A study published in July 2001 found that US Republicans are almost three times more likely to have nightmares than Democrats. But a Republican spokesman told New Scientist at the time&colon; “If we are, it’s because we’re left cleaning up the mess left by eight years of Bill Clinton. We sleep better now Bush is in the White House.”